The first signs of censorship are seen as early in human history as in ancient Egypt. The cradle of democracy in Greece had it (one of its victims was Socrates) as well as did Rome (where the term itself originates). We can read about the persecution of prophets from the Bible. The Catholic Church dismissed its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (list of banned books) as late as in 1966 (and even then with the clause "these books are not good for people"). The USSR had a massive censorship system with Glavlit and its branches; it also censored almost all religious literature (some memories among Estonian clergy about smuggling Bibles into the USSR could make excellent spy stories).And today, we have growing censorship issues worldwide - and especially alarming is its emergence in the so-called "democratic countries".
Censorship may take many forms, more common are
The anti-American sentiment seen in many places of the world would likely be a non-issue if the country ceased to pose as a poster democracy while having serious issues at home. The problem is that censorship has had a long history even in American society.
The 1873 Federal Anti-Obscenity Act promoted by Anthony Comstock (The Comstock Act; G.B. Shaw even used a derived word "comstockery") banned the following works and authors among others:
As an ironic twist, the four last ones were considered among the accepted "literature for children and youth" in the USSR (which was a hardline censor itself). Even more irony comes along with Ray Bradbury's famed "451 Fahrenheit" which is widely regarded as a brilliant piece of anti-censorship fiction. Yet its 1967 edition had "damn" and "hell" removed by the publisher, later another version went with about 75 "corrections".
Interestingly enough, the Net was left alone for quite a long time. Probably due to the fact that most hardcore censors were just too different folks from those using the Internet... An issue of 1995 Time Magazine had a feature story titled "Cyberporn" which is considered a starting point of network censorship. Even the fact that later on the article was found to be pretty incompetent, did not help: the genie had been released from the bottle.
One may possibly ask: if this is yet another pseudoproblem? Probably not. Access to information is largely a prerequisite for being a full citizen (e.g. if people do not have enough information on candidates, elections may end up in Soviet-style with single candidate and 99,8% of all votes for him). Only slaves do not need information (actually, the less they have it, the better for the master). And as seen from many examples, censorship has recently become a growing problem especially in the "democratic" Western world.
Especially in Internet censorship, the terminology seems to play an important role, giving the makers of the rules ample chance to "play with the public". For example:
Interestingly enough, the "parental control" (another great euphemism) is a big business in the US, while being next to unknown almost everywhere else. Granted, it is the largest IT-market in the world, but the fact only does not explain the peculiar situation. Just some products:
The censoring techniques include
The problem is that all these are inadequate. Even the simplest of these - address filtering - does not work well (see a good example below). Keyword filtering works even worse, as nearly all languages have homonyms and other language constructs which cannot be distinguished well enough (especially in traditional sayings and proverbs). And what comes to the much-touted AI-based attempts - not even natural intelligence is often not enough to grasp legal texts. IP addresses can be changed on the fly. Finally, whitelists are essentially against the very idea of the Web - if you can only access a couple of pages, it does not make much sense.
But the real problem is deeper. As said before, it is interesting to note that this kind of software is used only rarely outside the US. Reasons for this are many. First, the filtering database is proprietary and belongs to the (American) company - the fact that does not quite build trust. Tampering with the database is deemed illegal as it is considered a trade secret. So as the result, the user must trust the company to determine what is good for him/her and what is not. And to quote a movie, the final outcome for users is the Champignon Syndrome: kept in dark, fed on shit.
In the US, the First Amendment of the Constitution is probably the world's best known legal foundations for free speech. Yet at the turn of the millennium, the fight against it reached the highest spheres of the state:
The main issue is still: who decides? Even porn is not illegal in many places. And therefore, the initially well-meaning law is doomed to be the eternal playground for lawyer battles. Moreover:
So all those smart systems referred to above
So they really block some "bad" content. They also block lots of "controversial" material (birth control, minorities, human rights, women's and disability movements... And in the US, much more Democrats than Republicans) and a lot of really irrelevant stuff.
(An interesting side note: many controversial sites "cooperate" by actively promoting blocking measures on themselves - see [L] http://www.playboy.com/help/parents.html). Whether this "See, we try to help!" is sincere or not, remains to be decided by everyone.)
A couple of years ago, a leading anti-censorship website Censorware.net conducted a test of many popular "parental control" applications. The results were interesting indeed.
CyberPatrol blocked the Usenet newsgroup soc.feminism, NetNanny, CyberSitter and X-Stop kicked out a number of women's organisations (What's the problem with ladies?).
More X-Stop:
Bess did NOT block www.hardcoresex.com (it is quite hard to find a more direct reference to porn), but took a number of weird sites instead. E.g. a lot of Linux sites went under Alcohol due to WINE (the software used to run Windows programs on Linux).
SurfWatch labelled the parody site plugandpray.com as Sexually Explicit and blocked a site which advocated web filtering
The UNDP report from 1999 revealed that most of the Arabic world had Internet access. But it also had
There are three dangerous techniques which are especially unpleasant for authoritarian mindset:
"When the Declaration of Independence is banned from the citizens of Saudi Arabia so that they won't get ideas, we call it culturally backward. And when it's banned from our own libraries by our own government, then what do we call it?" - Michael Sims, Censorware Project
"Sir, request permission to read about molecular medicine, sir! " - from a critical article titled "Kill people, break things, stop looking at that"
The 9/11 events did bring along a new rise in censorship. The controversial Patriot Act was made into law only five weeks after the event (which is questionable in many aspects) and was followed by the Son of Patriot (Patriot 2) which made using cryptography outright illegal in some cases. The 2002 Homeland Security employed 160 000 agents to look after the country's own citizens. And things like Echelon are still alive.
More:
http://www.projectcensored.org
http://censorware.net
http://www.chillingeffects.org
1995-2012, Kaido Kikkas
Käesoleva dokumendi paljundamine, edasiandmine ja/või muutmine on sätestatud kas GNU Vaba Dokumentatsiooni Litsentsi versiooni 1.2 või uuemaga (Litsentsi ingliskeelne täistekst) või Creative Commonsi Autorile viitamine + Jagamine samadel tingimustel 3.0 Eesti litsentsiga
1995-2012, by Kaido Kikkas. This document is distributed under either GNU Free Documentation License (v1.2 or newer) or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Estonia license.